Movie Details
The School for Good and Evil (2022)
Director: : Paul Feig
Cast: Kit Young, Sophia Anne Caruso and Cate Blanchett
Movie Type: Fantasy/Adventure ‧
Release date: 18 October 2022
IMDB Rating: 5.9/10
Languages- 32 languages
Duration: 2h 27m
Trailer
Synopsis
The School for Good and Evil isn’t just pulling rabbits out of hats, waving a mace and shouting incantations, or snapping your fingers and erasing half the universe. Film The School for Good and Evil is also the ability of a given film to completely absorb a person, enchant his senses, and transport him to places that, although not real, seem real. Yes, that’s why movie magic is so rare today. Such magical experiences as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings or George Lucas’ Star Wars offered to entire generations of people simply cannot be repeated – but not that Hollywood is not trying. We have quite a few attempts to start such franchises here every year, but most of them still pay for the same thing – a misunderstanding of the basic essence of the movie The School for Good and Evil. Director Paul Feig’s School of Good and Evil is another sad example of this.
The film, whose plot is so primitive and annoying that it hurts, tells the story of two friends from a small village. One lives only with her mother, whom she has to take care of, and the other is an obnoxious, smug blonde who cares mostly about herself and wants to disappear from the village because her dream is to become a princess. Although she promises her best friend in the beginning that she won’t do it, a second later she goes on the trip anyway, which then kicks the door wide open for the rest of the plot. Both girls soon find themselves transferred to a magical school divided into two opposing factions – Good vs. Evil.
But to her surprise, the blonde ends up (quite expectedly) with the bad guys, while her good friend, and the only logical-minded character here, understandably ends up among the princesses. The rest of the film then revolves around the blonde trying to prove to everyone that she is good at all costs – while gradually becoming more and more evil – and her friend the protagonist wants to get back to her mother at all costs while discovering her power. You understood correctly that only the exposure itself lasts about an hour. Feig then used the remaining 80 minutes to torture all the audience’s senses, embarrass everyone who played in his film, and finally rape the fantasy genre as such.
If you were expecting The School of Good and Evil to revolve around fairy tale mythology, princes, princesses, iconic beings, and established timeless themes, then the news from Netflix has bad news for you. Not only is there practically no work with mythology here, but any residual efforts to build this world are tragically mishandled and sometimes even an outright insult to good taste. The sloppy way Excalibur is handled here, or how the magic is blatantly stolen from Harry Potter in one scene where the evil students cast curses on each other while Charlize Theron laughs it off, is a slap in the face, to say the least. Next, you would like to blame the director for how otherwise excellent actors like Laurence Fishburne (the school principal) or Michelle Yeoh (one of the teachers) have to suffer here, which is simply a pity for such nonsense.
The only positive I can think of isn’t very positive. We are talking about the supremely worst fight scene not only this year from the opening prologue when two brothers – the leaders of the individual factions of that legendary school – fight against each other. Thanks to the fact that Feig put it right at the beginning, the viewer can prepare nicely for the remaining two and a half hours of suffering. Yeah, the school is so bad that I seriously mention something like this as a plus.
Otherwise, I would just have to swear again. Curse how Feig tries to target TikTok-obsessed American teenagers in every other scene when it’s absolutely obvious that he and his film have no understanding of this generation. Cliché follows cliché, stereotypes are piled up every minute, many lines and scenes will make you tap your forehead (for example, the rock arrival of the princes and the surrounding girls drooling…bleh), and when it finally comes to the final “battle” for the cover of Toxic by Britney Spears, you have to laugh out loud regularly because there is no way anyone is serious about this. Sure, the central conflict between the main characters and their gradual transformations kind of worked, although the girls didn’t play it the best, they were surprisingly the only thing that ultimately saved Feig’s new movie from being a complete mess. Otherwise, there is almost nothing here. no atmosphere no impressive scene, not even humor. Feig has made a bloodless nasty fantasy that does not reach the ankles not only for Potter – he is in a completely different league – but also for the fallen Percy Jackson! And Netflix has confirmed again that it desperately needs that producer oversight for its films.
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